Fuckers

Did you see what fucking Photobucket did? Any embedded images hosted on their site were replaced with an ugly sign saying I can pay them $500 a year to get my pictures back. That sign is still almost every image on this blog for the archive dates 2005-2007. When they first did it I couldn't even see the images when I actually logged into Photobucket. They've now relented a fraction so I can go through the pictures one by one and download them to my own computer, which is how I managed to get the blog header back, although it's munted as you can see because either Blogger has done something to the template which makes what I originally did not work anymore, or (more likely) I amateurishly jerry-rigged the template and can't remember how.

What actually happened when Photobucket first did this is I couldn't look at my blog at all because it felt like it had been broken into and shat in by some Nazis. More accurately it felt like some Nazis shat in a drone and tapped a few commands into a computer in a shipping container in a business park somewhere very far from here and then the drone flew across several years of my life and squirted Nazi shit into every corner. I am not interested in conducting any kind of analysis of whether I am partly to blame for not taking better care of data that I obviously care very much about. Maybe later but not now.

At least the header image is back in a semblance of how it was before. I thought I would have to rebuild it to get it back, and putting aside the practicalities of how to recreate a specific variety of bad Photoshopping when you don't actually have Photoshop on your computer anymore, that rabbit was the essence of everything I aspired to be in those days and knowing that it didn't seem quite right to try to recreate it. I've changed a bit, although I still believe that the only way to fix the shit we're in is though a finely calibrated pedagogy of teaching people how to think mixed with telling them what to think (it saves time, and if you've taught them how to think properly they'll eventually get to the right conclusions anyway). But look, Ratty was got, and while that was nice for a while, in the long run his successors were as bad or worse, and this weekend people have been saying that Turnbull is about to be shafted by the party in favour of Dutton YES THAT'S RIGHT PETER DUTTON. If that's the prospect we're facing, by all means bring Ratty back immediately and Philip Ruddock too while we're at it.* Let's have Peter Reith as well.  So to cut a long story short it would really be better not to have to work through the existential crisis precipitated by the vandalising of my blog by fucking Photobucket. At least, not right now while my doctor is on holidays.


* Did you know that when Ruddock was finally nailed up alive under the floorboards of Parliament, Kevin Andrews took over from him at being "Father of the House"? The fact that our political system just keeps on producing fresh demonstrations that shit floats has nothing at all to do with patriarchy, said no one ever.